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Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

Spot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there’s a massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.

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"only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top"

Citation needed.

Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".

It can be. See glp1. Yes, whoever first came up with that approach is brilliant. But then the lemmings followed now a half dozen or so companies are peddling more or less the same product. And it comes at the cost of what isn’t getting investment at scale instead.

Academic Parma research is mostly billions of dollars, years of effort, a high chance of failure and very specific domain knowledge from the market. If it were so easy to get money this way more people would try

> Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.

Another example of government leaders choosing to not spend taxpayer money to pay for the expensive trials to get medicine approved for use.

Another example of voters voting for government leaders that campaign on privatizing the rewards in exchange for the promise of lower taxes.

Pharma is famous for being bad investment unfortunately.

Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most distant of principal agent problem and the government optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the taxpayers leann on the politicians.

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